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Avs' Roy rebuilding a winner

Coach has won over team with focused intensity

By Adrian Dater

The Denver Post

Posted:
03/15/2014 10:53:12 PM MDT

Updated:
03/15/2014 10:53:29 PM MDT

Avalanche coach Patrick Roy, center rear, watches from bench as the final seconds elapse in the third period of Wednesday's 3-2 win over the Blackhawks. In one year, Roy has turned the league's 29th worst team into one of the best. (David Zalubowski / Associated Press)

He began his NHL coaching career last fall with a wild-eyed, red-faced assault on a glass partition at the Pepsi Center. But this is what perhaps the team's best player had to say last week, without a hint of jest, about how Patrick Roy has made the Avalanche a winner again:

"The biggest thing he's brought is calm," said Avs center Matt Duchene, in his fifth season with the team and his first playing for Roy. "There's never any panic."

From that opening-night October victory over the partition, and the Anaheim Ducks, Roy's Avs have thumbed their padded hockey gloves at the NHL establishment with a 43-19-5 record. A team that finished 29th in a 30-team league a season ago is only a few points from having the best record in hockey with the playoffs less than a month away.

The season has shocked almost everyone — except Roy, who has quickly found his way to the top of the hockey world at every stop in his career with fire on ice.

From the moment he was hired last May, Roy planned to win. Immediately. At an early-season dinner at a Boston restaurant owned by friend and former Avs teammate Ray Bourque, they came up with a team slogan. "Why not us?" Bourque suggested, borrowing from the Boston Red Sox, who asked the same question on their way to winning the 2004 World Series. As the playoffs near, that slogan is on T-shirts worn by Avs players.

"It's a passion that he has, a determination, a will to win. It still amazes me," said Roy's father, Michel, who wrote a biography on his son titled "Patrick Roy: Winning. Nothing Else."

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"He's just so ... driven. What he wants to achieve, nothing gets in the way."

Every few years, with every new stop, the evangelism of the player they once called Saint Patrick adds more converts. The Gospel of Roy centers on one word: winning.

As a goalie, he led his team his team to four Stanley Cup titles, his first as a 20-year-old rookie with the Canadiens. He won a Stanley Cup in his first season with the Avs.

And he's now threatening to do the same as a rookie NHL coach.

"He's gotten his team to play the right way," said St. Louis Blues coach Ken Hitchcock. "They're hard to play against. They don't win (just) because they've got talent. They win because they play the right way. They don't cheat the game. ... Whoever gets them (in the playoffs) has got one of the hardest matchups they're ever going to see, because you've got young players with all kinds of skill that know how to play the game the right way."

All in it together

Upon being hired as coach and vice president of hockey operations for the Avalanche last May to replace Joe Sacco, Roy immediately sought to instill confidence in his players by asking them to be "partners."

In doing so, Roy assembled a coaching staff he felt comfortable being around. He recruited two former head coaches from the QMJHL — Andre Tourigny to run the defense and penalty killing and Mario Duhamel to serve as video coach. Roy's former Avs roommate, Adam Foote, was asked to come aboard in a part-time role, working with the defense, and Tim Army was retained from Joe Sacco's staff to work with the forwards and the power play. Roy made one other big hire: Francois Allaire, the goalie coach whose rise from obscurity coincided with Roy's in 1985-86 at Montreal when they were rookies in their jobs.

Roy then set about forming that partnership. In training camp, he held long talks with most players and worked in tandem with them on practice drills, skating alongside the play and barking out instructions.

He installed a new five-man-unit defensive system, in which "tracking" was paramount. Offensively, he devised schemes to funnel the puck up the middle of the ice more easily to his speedy forwards. To the players who had labored under Sacco's much more conservative offensive style, it was like going from the library to Disneyland.

"We're playing the way our team is built," Duchene said. "We're continuously trying to get better. But everybody has a smile on their face. It's so much better."

On that opening night against Anaheim, after Roy shoved the glass nearly all the way over in a verbal dust-up with Ducks coach Bruce Boudreau, Avs players might have wondered if their coach was crazy. It didn't take long to realize they had a real partner.

"Looking back on it, it created a pretty quick bond between him and us," Avs captain Gabe Landeskog said. "We knew we had someone in our corner right away."

Roy likes to think ahead, and he knew he needed to have a moment that would prove he had the players' backs. He just didn't think it would come so soon.

"All along, I'd been talking about a partnership with my players, to let them know that I'm with them. When that happened at the end, it certainly gave me an opportunity to show that I am with them. It's nice to talk, but sometimes talk is cheap," Roy said Friday.

Paul Stastny, the team's longest-serving member, has said a wall existed between players and management in previous years and players too often were "walking on eggshells" in the dressing room. Now, the atmosphere is much looser. Roy can be seen sharing a laugh with players on the ice or engaged in one-on-one banter while skating before practice. In the dressing room between periods, even after bad ones, Roy does not scream.

"He keeps it very positive," veteran goalie J.S. Giguere said. "Maybe just a couple times he's raised his voice slightly, but nothing more than that."

Roy's 10 years as an owner, coach, GM — everything but the guy who swept up at night — running the major junior Quebec Remparts prepared him well for his NHL coaching debut.

"He could have gone to Hawaii or Phoenix or Florida and just golfed. But he rode the buses from town to town in Quebec with a junior hockey team," said Craig Billington, Roy's former backup with the Avs and vice president of player personnel. "I went to see him there at times, and when you saw the detail work that he put in, it was amazing. ... He's applied that same approach to the Avs."

Newly single after a breakup from a longtime girlfriend in Quebec, Roy lives in the Cherry Creek neighborhood but spends many evenings at the home of Avalanche vice president of media relations, Jean Martineau, watching NHL games on TV and getting some home cooking from Martineau's wife, Brigitte. The three go back to grade school as friends.

Roy's children — Jana, Frederick and Jonathan — are grown and on their own, but he is frequent contact with them. Frederick plays for Buffalo's AHL team in Rochester, N.Y., and Roy watches as many of his games as he can on tape.

Roy isn't the slave to superstition he once was — no more hopping over the blue lines since retiring as a player — but he still has his quirks.

Roy usually has plenty of time for the media. But this season anyway, he has been hesitant to talk much about himself. He doesn't want his star power to overtake that of his young, still-blossoming team.

"The players deserve the credit. Focus on them," he said.

But Roy's star power continues to grow. He often gets the loudest cheers from fans during introductions. His work has him the runaway favorite to win the NHL's coach of the year award.

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